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Joey is a member of the Screen Actors Guild,[6] having refused to follow in his father's footsteps and become a pipe fitter.[7] He started his acting profession doing stage work, introduced in the show's pilot episode by Monica and Chandler having seen Joey in a production of Pinocchio. Sometime prior to the start of the series, Joey also had appeared in a porn film, as a fully clothed extra.[8] Joey also mentioned appearing in a play with trolls before getting the leading role of Sigmund Freud in the musical play Freud! where he was first spotted by his talent agentEstelle Leonard. She immediately got him a film role in the same episode as Al Pacino's "butt double" — a speechless role he later lost due to taking the part too seriously.[9] Monica and Chandler also once discussed having seen Joey in a version of Macbeth, in which he was unable to pronounce most of the words.

Joey becomes an "actor-slash-model" when he appears on print ads for the NYC Free Clinic, as a man named "Mario" who has a Venereal disease.[10] He also did an infomercial for a device that lets you pour milk out of milk cartons; he played "Kevin", a man who had extreme difficulty opening the cartons without the use of the device. ("Kevin" also inadvertently choked on a cookie during the show.). This haunted him again when he appeared in the play 'The King', where he was made fun of due to choking on a cookie.

In Season Two, Joey continued his stage work, appearing as "The King" in a poorly reviewed (and never-named) play. Published reviews of his performance claimed he was "disturbingly unskilled" and that he achieved "brilliant new levels of sucking" in a "mediocre play" with "mindless, adolescent direction".[11] Only days after these reviews came out, Joey gets his big break when he lands his first major role as Dr. Drake Ramoray on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. He had initially gone in to read for a one-shot role as a cab driver; it is implied that he got the recurring role of Ramoray by sleeping with the casting director.[11] While still playing Ramoray, he also appears in a bit role as a dead man in the film Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Several episodes later, Joey costs himself the Days of our Lives gig when during an interview with Soap Opera Digest, he radically overstates and claims he writes most of his own lines. This angers the show's writers, who out of spite, "kill off" his character by having Dr. Ramoray fall down an elevator shaft. Joey takes this very hard and admits that his role on Days was the best thing that ever happened to him.[12]

He goes back to stage acting in Season Three appearing in a play called Boxing Day opposite love interest Kate Miller. The play seems to start out as a conventional drama but ends with Joey's character "Victor" is taken from his apartment by aliens.[13] In Season Four, he lands a small one-scene movie role as a cop, playing his scene opposite Charlton Heston.[14]

Joey had some bad luck in terms of his acting career. In Season Five, he is cast in the independent filmShutter Speed, but it is shut down before filming began in Las Vegas.[15] He is also fired from a Burger King commercial. He filmed a role in a Law & Order episode that was cut from the completed episode—Joey was only "seen" as a corpse in a body bag.

In seasons 6 and 7, he lands a starring role as Detective 'Mac' Machiavelli in a very short-lived, and very bad cop show called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E, which Chandler described as "one of the worst things ever... and not just on TV." Joey had high hopes for the series, however Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E was canceled halfway through its first season.[16]

In Season 7, Joey auditions for the role of Dr. Striker Ramoray, a new character on "Days of Our Lives" and Drake Ramoray's brother but he doesn't get that role. Eventually, Joey's luck turns when he gets back his role as Dr. Drake Ramoray and even nominated for an award for Best Returning Character, first as a character in coma,[16] then revived through a brain transplant with another character Jessica Lockhart, (played by Susan Sarandon).[17]

In Season 7 he later replaces Susan Sarandon as Dr. Drake Jessica Ramoray. Later in the spin-off Joey, it turns out he loses his Role as Dr. Drake Ramoray and has to again hunt for a new job.

Joey is also briefly employed at Central Perk as a waiter. Facing a dry spell in his career as an actor, Joey is persuaded by Gunther, the manager, to take a job serving coffee. At first Joey tries to hide his new job from his friends, but they eventually figure it out. He does not like the work but, true to his nature, soon finds a way to use his position to meet and ingratiate himself to attractive women by giving them free food, a practice to which Gunther quickly puts a stop. Joey doesn't take his job very seriously and spends a lot of his working hours sitting and talking to his friends. Eventually he is fired for closing the coffeehouse in the middle of the day to go to an audition while Gunther was running a personal errand. Rachel later persuaded Gunther to give Joey back his job, but once Joey found more steady acting jobs he eventually just stopped showing up. His absence was barely noticed. In a later episode, Joey realizes he forgot to tell Gunther he quit, to which Gunther replied that he would have eventually fired him anyway.[19]

Joey is also briefly a sperm donor for a medical experiment; at the end, the hospital would pay any donor $700. This was later mentioned when Monica goes to a sperm bank. Joey finds to his dismay that his sperm is not very popular.[20]

He also worked at the restaurant "Alessandro's" where Monica was head chef, nicknaming himself "Dragon" while on the job. Monica hired him just so she could fire him to intimidate the other employees who paid Monica no respect, but he made a lot of tips and backed out of the deal, only to realize how important his getting fired was to Monica. He then set himself up to be fired the next day.

He spends one episode working with Chandler as an entry-level data processor. He treats the job like another acting role, in which he is "Joseph the Processing Guy" and creates a complex back-story for the character. Chandler begins to dislike the Joseph character when he starts showing up Chandler at work. Joey eventually leaves after Chandler pretends to sleep with Joey's "pretend wife".[22]

Prior to Monica and Chandler's wedding, when the two admitted that they were having trouble finding someone to perform the ceremony, Joey volunteered for the role, subsequently getting himself ordained over the Internet to entitle him to perform the marriage. He has apparently retained this role until Season Ten, when he performed the ceremony for Phoebe and Mike's wedding, claiming that priests are allowed to ride the subway for free (Although he states that the Bible must be read very carefully to identify the passage that permits this).

Joey is characterized as a simple-minded but good-natured womanizer who loves food. He particularly loves meatball sub sandwiches. When asked if he would give up sex or food he had trouble deciding and kept blurting out sex or food, eventually yelling "I want girls on bread!". In "The One with the Ride Along", he appears to be saving Ross from a putative gunshot, when it was actually his meatball sandwich that he was trying to save; it just happened to be next to Ross. He also loves the "Joey Special" — two pizzas. His greed when it comes to food is also shown in the episode "The One With the Birth Mother" where he refuses to call Sarah the next day. When Phoebe asks why, Joey explains how Sarah broke his golden commandment on their date - not to share food. Phoebe's shocked to say the least, but Rachel admits to her how this is who Joey is. Nonetheless, Phoebe makes Joey go out with Sarah again, making him order extra fries should the need arise. Joey does so, but Sarah really wants to dig in his seafood platter, making him drop his plate to the floor in the process. This makes him explain how "Joey doesn't share food", which she seems to understand. However, things change course when Joey wants to nibble at her chocolate torte. As he wouldn't share his food with her, she reciprocates and warns him not to touch any of her desserts while she wanders off to take a call. When she arrives, her dessert is pretty much gone; Joey, with chocolate torte all over his face, is at peace with himself, and admits that he's "not even sorry!". He is something of an idiot savant in general, but capable of good ideas when the situation arises; this is alluded to in the episode "The One Where Ross Dates a Student", when Chandler, referring to Joey, says "A hot girl's at stake and suddenly he's Rain Man" when Joey suggested Ross work out who among his students called him the 'hottie of the paleontology department' by comparing the handwriting of the note to the handwriting in the class essays. In another example, Joey made up an anecdote referred to as the "Europe story" or the "magic story"; apparently, anyone who hears it will immediately want to have sex with the teller. This is proven to be effective when Rachel successfully uses the story on Ross.[23]

Being a glutton when it comes to food, Joey is shown throughout the series to have the uncanny ability to eat enormous quantities of food. As he prides the Tribbiani family for their eating prowess ("We might not be [...] world leaders, but damn it, we can eat!"), he takes on Monica's challenge to eat a whole roast turkey virtually all by himself. In season 8, episode 9, Monica is unwilling to cook a whole roast turkey for Thanksgiving dinner as Rachel is pregnant, Chandler refuses to eat Thanksgiving food due to childhood traumas, Phoebe is a vegetarian, and dinner guest Will (played by Brad Pitt) is on a diet. Joey's love for Thanksgiving traditions, however, convinces Monica to roast the turkey only under the condition that Joey can eat the entire 19-pound bird in one sitting. When Monica sees him struggle, she says she is only kidding, but Joey perseveres and with a little help of Phoebe's maternity pants, he eventually not only consumes the entire turkey, but has room for dessert afterwards. A similar eating stunt happens in season 9, episode 5, when Joey is left alone at the dinner table in a restaurant after Phoebe's failed birthday dinner, and he is forced to eat six meals by himself. He finishes them, only to tuck into the birthday cake afterwards.

Joey is extremely promiscuous, often relying on his catchphrase pickup line "How you doin'?". He regularly sleeps with attractive women, but can never seem to get into a committed relationship - judging from a conversation he had with Chandler at the latter's bachelor party he seems to regard marriage as depressing and restrictive. He sleeps with many of the interns and extras on shows on which he works. He has apparently been sexually active for a very long time; he undid a 16-year-old girl's bra when he was nine, slept with his teacher in the seventh grade, and had a "wild spring break" when he was 13. In the episode "The One With Joey's Interview", he slept with the interviewer (played by Sasha Alexander) so what he said about having a life and not watching soaps wasn't published in Soap Opera Digest.

Despite his promiscuous nature towards many women throughout the series, he is highly protective and old-fashioned when it comes to the relationships of his own sisters. While he does not seem to have a problem with his own lifestyle, he repeatedly makes sure his sisters don't go down the same path. When he finds out in season 3, episode 11 that Chandler drunkenly made out with his sister Mary Angela, he attempts to force the two into a relationship. Later, in season 8, episode 10, Joey initially attempts to force his younger sister Dina into marriage with her hapless boyfriend upon hearing she's pregnant, but they play into his emotional nature by saying they want to raise the baby independently. They hug it out while Joey says the baby will "of course have its uncle Joey".

While he is not very bright, Joey is a caring and kindhearted person. He let Rachel live with him when she was fighting with Ross, financially supported Monica and Chandler, and helped Phoebe find work when she was unemployed. He was willing to marry Phoebe and Rachel on the separate occasions he found out that each was pregnant. Joey is also the most physically powerful of the group, being able to easily push Ross over a couch with only one hand, and offering to go to the coffee house to intimidate two bullies into leaving Ross and Chandler alone.

He is a Stephen King fan, having read The Shining several times, as well as being a fan of the film adaptation of one of King's novels, Cujo. He also becomes a fan of the classic novel, Little Women after Rachel asks him to read it to see if it was better than The Shining.[24] Joey briefly mentions to the gang that Al Pacino is his idol.[9] Joey has the poster for the 1983 Al Pacino film Scarface in his bedroom and the same poster is seen in his house in Joey. Joey, Ross and Chandler are huge fans of Die Hard.[25]

He moved apartment(s) four times in the series. The first time, he moved to his own lavish apartment away from Chandler (with whom the psychotic Eddie moved in) after he got the role as Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives, though he moved back soon afterward due to his loss of the role. The other times were when he and Chandler moved into what is usually Monica's apartment, after winning it from her in a game in "The One with the Embryos". They were later forced back to their own apartment by the girls.

Although Joey dated several women in the series, very few of these relationships were ever particularly serious, his romantic partners rarely appearing for more than one episode. However, despite his great interest in women, Joey has made it clear more than once that his friends were more important to him; when his latest relationship, Janine, stated that she strongly disliked Monica and Chandler, Joey soon broke it off with her despite the fact that he had been trying to win her over for the previous four episodes, telling Janine that Monica and Chandler were like his family and he couldn't be with Janine if she didn't like them.

Joey was originally shunned by Chandler when he came in for a roommate interview, and Joey thought Chandler was gay. However, Mr. Heckles, another building resident, lied to Chandler's originally selected roommate, causing Chandler to have to go with his second choice roommate Joey (In "The One with the Flashback" set in 1993, Joey moved in 3 years before although in "The One with All the Thanksgivings" it shows that the gang knew Joey was Chandler's roommate in 1992 and he would have been his roommate for quite some time). Joey's first couple of days involved a brief, mutual attraction to Monica. This subsided and Chandler and Joey quickly became best friends as Joey's carefree lifestyle grew on Chandler.

Later in the series, they bought a chick and a duck together, whom Chandler had named Yasmine and Dick, respectively. A long-running gag depicted Joey and Chandler occasionally fighting with each other like an old married couple. Joey moved out temporarily when he found success playing Dr. Drake Ramoray on a soap opera, but soon moved back in after his character was dropped down an elevator shaft. At the end of the series, Chandler and Monica made it clear to Joey that their new house outside the city would have a room for him.

While Joey is best friends with Chandler, Ross is a close second (although Ross has been referred to as his best friend several times). At a time when Joey and Chandler had problems, when Chandler had kissed Joey's girlfriend, Joey stopped acting as Chandler's best friend and replaced him with Ross, although this only lasted until Chandler spent Thanksgiving in a box in order to show his remorse and apologize to him. Joey and Chandler have remained best friends ever since.

Furthermore, Joey and Ross share a moment in an episode after watching Die Hard all night. They fall asleep on Ross' couch, which is evidently enjoyed by Joey, as he tries to coerce Ross into more nap sessions with him. Also, earlier in the series, after much persuading by Joey, Ross gives in and kisses him to help him practice kissing men. In response, Joey replies that the audition was already over, he hadn't gotten the part, but the kiss was very well received.

The major development of their relationship outside the realm of normal male interaction was when Joey fell in love with Rachel, Ross's ex-girlfriend and the object of Ross's affections since ninth grade. When Joey goes on to tell Ross about it, he can't say it in his face and instead says that he loves his "friend's" ex-girlfriend. When asked if that "friend" (Ross) is a good guy, Joey honestly answers "Yeah... He's the best". Initially it causes a major rift, with Joey being apologetic, but when Ross sees Joey truly in love with Rachel he gives him the go ahead. Ross basically says that he's not okay with it but he wants to be, and the two's friendship deepens due to Joey's refusal to date Rachel unless Ross okays the deal. However, Joey and Rachel do not date long and later Joey encourages Ross to pursue Rachel in the season finale.

Joey and Monica are close friends often joking around with each other. Joey allowed Monica to hire and fire him to prove to her employees that she was not a pushover. When he discovered that Monica and Chandler had developed a romantic relationship, he agreed to keep it secret until the two were ready to reveal it to the rest of their group. In an episode where he sees how close Chandler and Monica are, he dreams of himself and Monica in the same way. This later causes him to act weird around Monica. Finally he reveals this to Chandler and Monica, its that he wants a relationship like that, but Monica finds it nice thinking Joey thought of them two together. He also called Chandler moments after suspecting Monica of having an affair with a mystery male he had heard in her apartment. When Monica and Chandler needed their Engagement Picture taken, Chandler could not smile. In the newspaper announcement, it showed the photo was of Monica and Joey.

Joey always enjoyed a close relationship with Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe; LeBlanc once speculated that Joey saw the girls as sisters more than potential romantic interests. However, the tension between Monica and Joey is at times fairly obvious and it is made clear that the two have a very close, almost intimate, relationship, though it is never consummated on the show.

According to DVD commentary of the pilot episode, Joey and Monica were initially meant to be the principal love connection of the show but was overshadowed by the Ross-Rachel relationship. In Episode 1.07 "The One with the Blackout", Phoebe blurted to Joey that Monica has a crush on him when he was moving in with Chandler. This idea was revisited in Season 7 when it is revealed that Monica initially meant to hit on Joey in London, and not Chandler. She states that it was because she was looking for something meaningless, never expecting to have found Chandler and fall in love with him. The concept of what their marriage would have been like was then envisioned by Phoebe and it consisted of Monica cooking all the time for a very fat Joey.

Phoebe is Joey's female best friend. They appear to understand each other. They are the only members of the group who lack a college education. Joey is Phoebe's best male friend; they have dinner together once a month to talk about the rest of the group and Joey like to be called 'Big daddy' by phoebe . Both characters show a softness for each other, even when joking or when they are upset with the others. In "The One with the Race Car Bed", it is implied that Phoebe can hear Joey's thoughts. In "The One With the Ride Along", she explains that "when the revolution comes, I will have to destroy you all...not you, Joey". In the episode "The One in Vegas", after Joey has said that no one will live in his hand shaped mansion, he adds "Except you Pheebs... You can live in the thumb."

When she was a surrogate mother for her brother's triplets and suddenly craved meat, Joey offered to eat no meat until the babies were born, to compensate for her consumption and, in a way, preserve her vegetarianism (no extra animals would have to be killed). In The One With All the Cheesecakes, it is shown that the two tried to meet once a month for dinner in order to discuss the other Friends. When Phoebe was upset because she'd turned thirty-one without having had the perfect kiss, Joey kissed her so that she could cross that off her list (also adding that he was one-sixteenth Portuguese when she mentioned that she hadn't met any Portuguese people).

Joey did not have romantic feelings for Phoebe. Joey dates briefly Phoebe's twin sister Ursula, which upsets Phoebe; he breaks it off to preserve his friendship with Phoebe, however.[26]

When Monica finds out that Joey "sees a friend in a different way", she assumes it to be Phoebe. Phoebe, overwhelmed by the news, approaches Joey, only to find that it is Rachel. Phoebe also has Joey locked in as a backup for her marriage.

When the Friends believe that the group may have to split up, Phoebe and Rachel conspire to form a separate group by themselves, but Phoebe insists that Joey be invited to their new group as well. Phoebe's loyalty is proved again when she states that she could live in Las Vegas, since it has everything she needs, "Including Joey!". He, in turn, invites her to live with him in the mansion he expected to own when he becomes rich from having a hand twin.

When Joey learned from a customer at Central Perk that Phoebe was apparently a porn star, he refused to watch the movies even when the other four decided to do so. However, he shows a new interest in them when he learned that the film actually stars Ursula.[27]

When Joey believes Phoebe to be pregnant, he proposes, claiming the world is too scary for a single mother. This proposal is apparently made entirely without romantic intentions. Phoebe says yes and accepts his ring, but Monica tells Joey that it is Rachel who is pregnant, so Joey proposes to Rachel and must retrieve the ring from a reluctant Phoebe.[28]

Phoebe also sets up Joey with many of her friends. On a double date, Joey sets her up with a stranger, Mike (Paul Rudd), whom she eventually marries.

In one episode, after persuasion from Rachel, he reads Little Women and she reads The Shining. She finds out that whenever he gets scared whilst reading he puts the book in the freezer. At the end of the episode, Joey is afraid that one of the characters is going to die and Rachel says 'Do you want to put it in the freezer?' Their close friendship continues and when a fire destroys Rachel and Phoebe's apartment, Rachel moves in with Joey and stays there, even after her apartment has been repaired.

Halfway through season 8, Joey and Rachel go out on a date, so that Rachel can have one night of fun before it becomes too obvious that she's pregnant. They have a great time, and afterwards, Joey starts developing feelings for Rachel unbeknown to her. He does not act on his feelings because he is too loyal to Ross and feels like it would betray him to have a possible relationship with Rachel. However, upon discovering that Joey's not just having a crush on Rachel, but is in fact in love with her, Ross encourages his friend to talk to her. Joey tells Rachel about his feelings, but she does not return them, and things are awkward between them for a while.

In late season 9, Rachel starts developing feelings for Joey, but fears he does not feel the same way anymore and has already moved on, especially when he starts dating Charlie. When the gang goes to Barbados for a convention from Ross' work, Joey finds out about Rachel's feelings, and even though he first says nothing can happen, he changes his mind when he sees Charlie and Ross kiss, and he goes back to Rachel's room to be with her. They continue their relationship for several episodes and gain Ross' approval after he realizes it's been six years since his relationship with Rachel ended, and he should move on from that. When Rachel and Joey prepare for their first night together, however, they realize they're too close as friends to make their relationship work, with Rachel instinctively slapping Joey away when he tries to touch her as she suddenly finds herself unable to get past the fact that it's Joey touching her. After Chandler mentions how natural it was for him and Monica to make the transition from friends to lovers, Joey and Rachel realize they aren't on the same path and go back to being friends. At the end, when Chandler and Monica announce that they are moving into a house, Joey presents them with a housewarming gift of a chick and a duck, who are named Chick Jr. and Duck Jr. The pets remain in Joey's apartment but were presumably given away to a shelter when Joey moved to LA.
Soon after Chandler and Monica moved out, Joey moved to LA to focus on his acting career. That was the last time the 6 best friends hung out together.

After the 2003/2004 final season of Friends, Joey Tribbiani became the main character of Joey, a spin-off TV series, where he moved to L.A. to polish his acting career. His sister Gina Tribbiani and her son Michael (Paulo Costanzo) were two other central characters of the show.

Joey turned down a role in a sitcom called Nurses to star in a different series pilot. His pilot did not get picked up, while Nurses became a huge hit. However, his acting career has had some better moments. In Joey, it is revealed that Joey's character of Dr. Drake Ramoray died again on Days of our Lives where he is stabbed by a nurse ("Joey and the Wrong Name"). He won a Daytime Soap Award for "Best Death Scene". In later Joey episodes, Joey landed a starring role on the prime time soap Deep Powder. When he got fired from that job, he almost immediately bounced back by snagging a leading role in the big-budget action picture Captured.

The series' penultimate episode sees Joey in an established and committed relationship with Alex Garrett, his next-door neighbor.